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Theory and Practice of Peer Counselling

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 The Theory and
Practice
of
Peer
Mentoring
in
Schools
Rey A. Carr, Ph.D.
Peer Resources
www.peer.ca

Plus Bonus Access to

Continuously Updated
Research and Peer
Mentor Program
The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring
Examples from 1
Around the World.
 THE THEORY AND PRACTICE
OF
PEER MENTORING
IN
SCHOOLS

by

Rey A. Carr, Ph.D.

Peer Resources
http://www.peer.ca

Presentation originally made to the National Consultation on Vocational

Counselling, January, 1981 and published in Educational and Vocational
Guidance (1984), 42, 1-9.

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 2

 Abstract

The overemphasis on the negative aspects of peer pressure has

resulted in youth being ignored as a source of positive help to other
youth. This article explains the rationale, origins, and practice of peer
helping, a system that uses the positive peer pressure skills of
empathy and decision-making tools to help others. Young people can
be easily trained to use these skills and help others make effective,
responsible decisions spanning nearly all aspects of their
development.

BONUS Materials Available

Since this white paper was originally written, we have compiled an

extensive list of a variety of peer mentor programs and we have tracked
all the research associated with this powerful idea. As a reader of this
work, you have access to the complete list of peer mentor programs
(along with contact information) as well as access to the latest
research studies. This information is available to you on our website at
http://www.peer.ca

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 3

For most school counsellors, students are primarily clients who
require services in academic, personal-social and career areas.
Students are usually seen individually or in groups and are passive
recipients of counselling services. Until recently students have been
ignored as a resource able to provide assistance to fellow students.
In fact, peer culture itself is often seen as a powerful negative force
in need of adult control and management. However, without the
active help of students in resolving their own psychological
problems and crises of human development, it is unlikely that
counselling programs or services will be successful or effective.
Instead counsellors must engage students as cooperative allies and
abandon attempts to win students over through reason or logic. In
addition, counsellors must accept the influence power of the
existing social network and learn how to enhance the foundations
and purposes of the network. Counsellors must also recognize the
skills, needs, and behaviours that already are part of a student's
repertoire and build on these. Counselling services, then, cannot
continue to mold, shape, or force students to fit a model of
professional delivery that is alien to the culture it is attempting to
serve. Instead, the counselling service must be based on a thorough
understanding and use of the factors influencing student
development.

Programs or approaches using these development ideas are

beginning to emerge and gain credibility. Peer tutoring (Allen, 1976),
positive peer culture (Vorrath and Brendtro, 1974) and peer
assistance (Carr, 1980; Myrick and Erney, 1978; Varenhorst, 1974),

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 4

are examples of interventions that draw on principles of
development and the values of the existing student network.
Peer assistance can be used at many age levels to attend to a
variety of problems such as drug and alcohol abuse (Samuels and
Samuels, 1975), stress management (Walley, 1980), teenage
pregnancies (Foster and Miller, 1980), loneliness (Carr and
Saunders, 1979), friendship (Varenhorst, 1978), and widowhood
(Romaniuk, Priddy and Romaniuk, 1981). Since it can easily be
extended to a variety of other areas such as vocational and career
development, the purpose of this article is to describe the origins of
peer assistance, illustrate the training model of peer assistance as
developed by the Peer assistance Project at the University of
Victoria, and relate examples of how peer assistance is practiced in
school settings.

What is peer assistance?

Basically peer assistance is a way for students to learn how to care
about others and put their caring into practice. It relies strongly on
communication skills to facilitate self-exploration and decision-
making. Peer assistants are not professional counsellors or
therapists. They are students who provide supervised assistance to
other students to help think through and reflect on concerns they
might be experiencing. A trained peer assistant who is recruited
from a core social network can have numerous informal and
spontaneous contacts, thus multiplying their impact on a variety of
other students. These contacts can enhance the climate of the

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 5

school and can act as a bridge between professional counselling
and students who will not see school counsellors.

Peer assistance is a deliberate and systematic form of psychological

education. It enables students to have the skills to implement their
powerfully experienced valuing of autonomy and control. By
focusing on the process of thinking, feeling, and deciding, rather
than evaluating specifically the content, it contributes to the most
powerfully experienced need of adolescents: respect. The peer
assistant is trained to provide a nonjudgmental listening posture
that encourages others to express and explore their concerns,
worries, or frustrations. This exploration often prevents self-
destructive or other acting-out behaviours by encouraging a student
to talk with someone who listens, or "has been there", or can
empathize.

Some persons have expressed concern about the word "mentor"

being applied to teenagers, and are worried that the term has
professional or business connotations. Various programs have
accommodated this idea by calling their trained students by other
titles such as peer facilitators, peer educators, student support
workers or buddies. The importance is not in the title but in how
the students relate to other students, and the way in which these
relationships can be used to enhance their development. We
typically use the term “peer assistance” as an umbrella term to
cover the wide range of positive helping relationships students can
have with other students.

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 6

What are the origins of peer assistance?
In order to understand the training and program operations of peer
assistance it may be useful to briefly explore the nine foundation
areas which have significantly contributed to its creation and led to
its natural development.

Over the past few years, a number of large-scale evaluations of

school counselling have taken place across Canada (Carr, 1978;
Guerette, 1981; Haughey and Bowman, 1980). While these studies
had somewhat different purposes, were conducted with a variety of
student populations and used different survey instruments, some of
their conclusions are remarkably similar: only a minority of
students ever go to see counsellors. Most students, when
experiencing some kind of personal concern, rely primarily on their
friends as sources of help. With only minor changes in percentages
these findings hold true regardless of age level, quality of
counselling available, or experience in working with a counsellor.
Similar studies conducted in the United States (Prediger, Roth and
Noeth, 1974) have demonstrated the same results; namely, that
friends remain the number one in-school resource for students
considering personal decisions, job plans, and how far to go with
formal education.

A second foundation for peer assistance comes from research on

the helping relationship itself (Carkhuff, 1969; Egan, 1975; and
Ivey, 1971). The skills associated with effective helping have not
only been described and demystified, but have also been shown to

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 7

be learnable by a variety of lay persons, including paraprofessionals
(Carkhuff, 1969), high school students (Carr and Saunders, 1979),
junior high students (Carr, McDowell and McKee, 1981), and
elementary age students (Bowman and Myrick, 1980). The training
itself can also serve as a form of treatment and the peer assistants
enhance their own development and psychological growth. An
important implication of helping skill research is that the skills are
not only helpful, but can be taught to younger persons so that they
can be used within the youth culture. While a number of recent
therapy advances appear promising (neurolinguistic programming,
for example), it remains unclear as to whether young people can
learn to use these approaches.

Across North America, high school students have responded to

surveys designed to assess what they see as the major problems
confronting youth today (Carr, 1980). The results, which serve as
the third foundation block, consistently reveal that loneliness or
making and keeping friends are either the highest or among the top
five concerns of young people. These self-reported rankings often
differ remarkably from adult rankings of what adults perceive as
the major problems concerning youth. This difference is an example
of a potential "generation gap" which may prevent students from
seeking help from adults.

More seriously, even though friendship concerns occupy a major

proportion of students' time, and as Rubin (1980) has stated, are
often the sources of greatest pleasure and deepest frustration,

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 8

social scientists have paid virtually no attention to them. It is likely
that friends can help each other learn things that are unique and
cannot be taught by parents or educators. Debilitating conditions at
home can often be neutralized through involvement with peers in
school (Rubin, 1980). Contrary to popular opinion, friendship
patterns do not remain stable within the school context, and it
appears that the purposes of friendship change as students get
older. Senior high students describe a friend as a person who
listens, helps, and communicates in depth. Friendships are
characterized by mutuality or a willingness to be helpers to each
other.

Many teenagers have already learned how to make friends and they
remain quite popular with their peers, even though sometimes not
liked by their teachers. These students have acquired certain skills
such as abilities to be attentive and supportive, to manage conflicts
appropriately, to be sensitive to others and express thoughts and
ideas in way that others do no feel their esteem is threatened. And
while knowledge of how to make and keep friends can contribute to
success, it is only secondary to an ability and willingness to use the
skills in a practical way. Students who possess these skills are
more often than not unaware of what they actually do on a
conscious basis. These students when involved in reflective-oriented
training can learn very easily how to teach others to do what they
do to make and keep friends.

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 9

The fourth basis for using students to help other students comes
from the emphasis on primary prevention (Albee and Joffe, 1981)
within the mental health movement and with the application of
preventive counselling (Carr, 1976) within school settings.
Prevention programs have a two level thrust: the need to strengthen
(or immunize) students against harmful influences (by providing
skills in resolving problems more effectively) and at the same time
reduce the incidence of psychologically destructive factors within
the environment (eliminate an uncaring environment, for example).

Student needs for competency (to be strong), intelligence (not

academic, but to know the scene, keep from getting conned),
responsible role taking (to be respected) and self-esteem (to be
valued and understood) form the basis for foundation five. Students
recognize how powerful these needs are and often direct their best-
shot, put down comments in these directions: "baby, boring, suck,
dumb, stupid, weird, retard"; and their best compliments as: "fox,
Mr. Macho, cool, got-it-together". Adults often react to the
superficial manifestations of these needs with patronizing, scornful,
or disrespectful behaviour (often with the intention of "helping"), but
the students, being intensely sensitive to the needs, will retreat
further, fight back, or become self-destructive. They generally turn
to other students who have shared similar embarrassing,
humiliating, or need-ignoring experiences and who will listen, not to
approve or disapprove, but to accept and understand. Research and
knowledge about human development closely parallels student
needs and serves as the sixth foundation. A key issue in

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 10

adolescence is independence, but as Ivey (1977) has pointed out, it
is important to understand independence in relation to peer culture
perspectives. For example, Coleman (1980) has discovered that, for
teenage boys, independence means freedom from constraint, the
freedom in life to become what one wishes; whereas, for girls,
independence means internal freedom, or the opportunity to be
one's self and to have some autonomy with respect to one's feelings
and thoughts.

Adolescence has also been described as a time of identity seeking,

using Erikson's terms, securing identify and avoiding identity
diffusion. Yet all too often counsellors have assumed this time to be
a teenager's search for the "real self", when, in fact, it is less of a
time when one finds oneself and more of a time when one makes
oneself. It is the daily interactions and experience (or lack of ) with
fellow students that shape the self-perception more dramatically
than any amount of self-reflection or intelligence.

Despite the glut of textbooks on adolescent development, very little

is really known about individual differences among teenagers. For
example, as a development specialist, it is clear to me that the
power of the peer group is not only greatly misunderstood but also
grossly exaggerated. This is perpetuated by adults seeing all
teenagers as the same and ignoring the developmental process
which experiences important changes and differences in friendship,
group memberships, motivation and values. Counsellors may be
particularly insensitive to the social evolution of the peer group or

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 11

cliques and tend to overrate their impact and influences as well as
misunderstand their constructive role.

The effects of peers tutoring peers (Allen, 1976; Gartner, Kohler and
Reissman, 1971) has received considerable attention and serves as
another foundation block. Generally, the research on tutoring
supports the value of using peers to improve the achievement and
esteem of other students. Research has suggested that tutoring is
as helpful for the tutor as for the tutee (Chandler, 1980) and that
student-tutors may surpass teacher-tutors in tutoring some
students (Karegianes, Pascarella and Pflaum, 1980). In addition
many students prefer to learn from peers, and evidence gathered by
Price (1980) on student learning styles, indicates that students are
less teacher- motivated in the higher grades and that low motivated,
learning disabled students are more likely to be peer-oriented.
Research by Shaefer (1980) and Condry and Siman (1976) has
revealed that peer-oriented students become dependent on the peer
group not by choice but by necessity because of a lack of attention
and affection at home. This shift occurs around sixth grade, and is
followed by pre-delinquent behaviour in grades seven and eight.

The increasing popularity of self-help (Romeder, 1981) or mutual

aid groups (Peavy, 1978) provides the eighth origin for peer
assistance. Basically, these groups are formed by peers whose
mutual needs are often unmet by. existing services or who are
unable or unwilling to use available institutions. They meet to
address shared or common concerns and often rely on the

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 12

relationship of member to member to resolve problems, using
support and catharsis as a problem-solving intervention. Probably
the most famous and most successful (in terms of longevity,
participation, and outcomes) is Alcoholics Anonymous. Women's
groups, Weight Watchers, cancer patients, family groups, single
parents, Parents of Murdered Children are just a few additional
examples. Adolescents have formed their own mutual aid groups,
yet the positive, coping functions of these groups to assist in the
healthy development of teenagers have virtually been ignored for the
more sensationalist negative or conflict producing behaviours.
While we have no formal research to support our observations, it
appears that kids aged 8 to 12 also tend to form groups or mouse
packs, thus indicating an earlier age for peer orientation.

Finally, the last foundation for peer assistance is based on the costs
and availability of professionals. The historic 1961 report of the
Joint Commission on Mental Illness clearly specified the need to
improve community resources rather than to spend extensive funds
on professional training. Despite increases in professional
personnel and advances in effective therapeutic interventions, the
problems of teenagers continue to outpace the growth and
availability of formal help. Skyrocketing costs for services,
unmanageable case loads and long waiting lists, growing cynicism
about the skills of professionals, and frightening statistics about
adolescent death and disability, violence and depression require the
enlistment of adolescents themselves in helping each other.
Students generally know much sooner than adults when another

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 13

student is experiencing trouble and can be in close, more
spontaneous contact. Peer assistants supplement existing
counselling services and can free counsellors to work with or refer
seriously troubled students. Peer assistants can also serve as a
bridge to get a troubled friend involved in professional help.

The Peer Assistance Model

Having examined the foundations of peer assistance, we can now
turn to how programs are organized, what is involved in training,
and how students work with other students.

As with any successful intervention it is important to develop a

strong practical foundation upon which the program can rely. We
begin by assessing the needs of the client population (using
surveys, interviews, observations, etc.) to determine whether peer
assistance is the most appropriate or highest priority intervention
for improving student psychological health. We also enlist the
support of parent groups, teaching staff, etc., by forming advisory
committees or having them involved in the training. While
counsellors appear to be the most likely persons to run or organize
peer assistance, they are often unavailable or highly reluctant.
Involving non-counsellor personnel is often beneficial because it
encourages and supports the helping interests of other persons
within the school context. Parents are often the most enthusiastic
group, and have quickly seen the value of improving the quality of
student to student help.

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 14

We also insure the objectives for the program are clear and written
out. In addition, we assess the training skills of the trainers and
provide training courses for persons interested in training students.
Initially, the Peer assistance Project personnel began by training the
students ourselves, primarily to insure that our training approach
was appropriate for adolescents. Having satisfied ourselves that
training was appropriate and having trained a variety of different
groups, we realized it would be more efficient and empowering for
us to train others to do the training and then remain available to
consult with them on problems they encountered.

The final element of the start-up process concerns thinking through

trainee selection procedures, preparing a systematic model of
training, and creating an approach to evaluation. The next steps
after building the foundation are recruiting and selecting students,
delivering the training itself to small groups, providing supervised
assignments, and supervising the program itself. Since these areas
have a strong practical base, and because we have been asked a
number of times to respond to questions in these areas, each of
them will be detailed here.

Recruiting and Selection

Since peer assistance is based on the well-documented evidence
that peers seek help from peers, it is clear that many students are
already providing some kind of help to other students. For training
purposes it is helpful if these students can identify themselves
through requests for volunteers who are interested in counselling or

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 15

helping. We generally ask two questions to help volunteers become
interested: "have you ever tried to help a friend, but didn't know
what to do?" and "do you know what it's like to have worries,
concerns, frustrations?" In addition to seeking volunteers, we
encourage students to nominate other students and staff to
nominate students (sometimes these nominations are quite
different from each other). We also ask parents, and from our
observations of students in the school, we nominate potential
students. Finally, we encourage the use of empirical nominations
that can serve as both identifying and verifying activities. Examples
of such approaches include sociograms (who talks to whom), class
play techniques ("who would you choose to play the role of a people
helper in this play?"). We also identify using student vernacular,
such as what are the identifiable social groups in the school (for
examples, "heads, greasers, sucks"), and ask if they know people
who fit in more than one group. Actually, we draw circles on a
blackboard representing each of the groups students identify, and
we show the circles intersecting, so that at one point all the circles
overlap (part of our definition of a network), and ask the students
who they know that would fit into the intersections. We then will
make written and personal requests of the student names received
from a variety of nominations and, together with the volunteers,
hold an information meeting. The meeting is advertised through
bulletins, announcements, word-of-mouth, posters, lunches, staff
meetings, speakers programs, and in-class recruiting. Once a
program has been initiated, peer assistants can take over these
activities in order to implement the philosophy of students speaking

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 16

to students. Vocational education programs have begun to realize
that teen-to-teen communication may be the most effective method
to reach teenage audiences (Walton and Howard, 1980).

Many programs that have implemented our approach find a high

number of female students volunteering. This is easy to understand
since these young women are often more aware of their values of
caring and expressing concern for others. We modify this imbalance
by encouraging them to directly recruit or talk to male students.
This has had dramatic effects in bringing in the young men.

At the information meeting we describe the training, its potential

uses, and ask who would be interested. From questions they ask,
we can infer student interests ("Can I take this in place of
geometry? Will it be after school? Will there be course credit?"). At
this meeting we usually ask a question of our own to make sure a
peer assistance program fits in with student needs: "Would such a
program be of value in your school?" The answer is always a
resounding "yes". Generally, there are more volunteers than can be
trained at any one time, so we work out a schedule that puts
students on a waiting list. For research-oriented persons this
waiting list can serve as a control group (we have done this). If
parent permission is necessary, and we think it should be—partly
to inform and educate parents through the permission letter itself,
and in part to insure their support—permission forms are
distributed to the students at the information meeting. We make
sure the letter has enough detail in it so that parents can make

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 17

informed decisions. Anybody who works with students and sends
things home to get signed knows how frustrating it can be trying to
get them back; however, we have found the letters return quickly,
sometimes with handwritten post scripts praising the idea.
Students also have commented on discussions they have with their
parents about the program that have been stimulating and
encouraging.

When the letter comes back we hold interviews with each student
during which time we ask them about themselves, their experiences
in relating to others and we try to assess their learning style. This
can be done with a specific instrument such as the Inventory
developed by Dunn and Dunn, (1978). We give them feedback about
their style and we are primarily looking to see how interested they
are in hearing about themselves. A decision to advance to training
is made solely on the basis of two behavioural criteria: a) are they
receptive to knowing about themselves, and b) do they have severe
emotional problems which would make them unable to use the
training or interfere with the training. If the answer is yes to this
second question, we will discuss possible referral with them to
either school or community resources. We have underlined severe
above because we often make a clinical judgment here, since
students experiencing a variety of developmental problems can not
only benefit from the training, but serve as excellent helpers for
students with similar concerns. However, since the major goal of
peer assistant training is to increase the number of students who

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 18

have and use helping skills, the training should not be used as a
substitute for group counselling or guidance courses.

Training Process
We divide students into separate training groups of six to eight, and
the training consists of two phases. The first phase consists of 12 to
16 training sessions, one to two hours in duration, which we ideally
like to schedule twice a week, so that initial training takes about six
to eight weeks. The second phase consists of a series of supervised
assignments resembling a practicum, and weekly supervision
meetings are held with students in groups of 10 to 12. Since we are
strongly committed to a learning-based model of training, we have
structured each training session with a systematic process to
maximize student skill development. Each session begins with
continuity, where old business is discussed, concerns are
expressed, opportunities for caring and sharing with others given,
and homework is discussed. We then move to the awareness portion
where a description or directions are given for today's session; the
rationale and purpose are briefly stated; students make a self-
calibration and/or declare their need concerning the topic and
relate how it might fit them from their frame of reference. We next
emphasize know-how, where we provide a demonstration, deliver a
lecturette, and use group techniques such as creative use of
brainstorming, role play or modelling. Following this is the
assertiveness section where students work in pairs, or trios doing
simulation or other experiential activities. We then move to the
process phase where observers give feedback; we inquire as to the

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 19

quality of experience; and work towards synthesis, integration, and
summarizing. The session concludes with a practice phase where
homework is assigned and then we start the cycle again with
continuity at the next session. Homework is often an applied
assignment focused on generalizing the learning from the session to
the cultural world of the student. We closely monitor these steps
and discover at many times a particular spot where we cannot move
on to the next step because we haven't adequately covered a
previous step. We rely continuously on feedback, observation and
actual skill performance, and may recycle back to a particular step.

Training Content
We have identified twelve core topics that are essential to peer
assistance and we have detailed the step-by-step procedures for the
activities in our training manuals, The Peer Helping Starter Kit (Carr
& Saunders, 1979); Out of the Mainstream Youth Peer Program
Training Materials and Resources (Carr & DeRosenroll, 1995); and
The Mentor Program Development Resources Kit (Carr, DeRosenroll,
& Saunders, 1991). The content we cover consists of: getting
acquainted with strangers; attending skills; roadblocks to better
communication; self-disclosure and expression of feelings; listening;
empathy training; questioning; assertiveness or "I messages";
feedback skills; values clarification; decision-making; problem-
solving; ethics; confidentiality; and referral. (These manuals are
available at http://www.peer.ca/pubs.html)

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 20

Once the core skills have been reasonably mastered we recommend
that programs develop practicum topics from the experiences of the
students trying to implement their new skills. We recognize they
may feel awkward, mechanical or phony, so we accept this as part
of the learning process and help them locate their feelings or
thoughts. Handling silence; talking to students whose behaviours
you don't dig; trying the skills in a group setting; and getting
rebuffed are all examples of specific problems students bring up
which we turn into training sessions.

The final elements of the training takes place during supervision

when special topics are introduced which relate to specific problems
such as drugs, parents, career decisions, pregnancy. We may
introduce speakers (who support process learning) to talk about
certain areas or we may do refreshers in the core area.

Our training model begins with a pre-determined structure and

ends with a student-determined structure. We retain the emphasis
on process throughout, yet we are sensitive to the needs of the
students so that neither the structure nor the process act as a
barrier to truly understanding and fully relating to our student
trainees. In other words, we remain student-centered rather than
strictly agenda-centered.

Assignments as Peer Assistants

When the approximately thirty hours of training has been
completed, the trainer(s) meet(s) with each student individually, and

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 21

applying the guidelines from the activities on feedback, discuss with
the student how they did on the training, what age level or kinds of
problems they would like to deal with, the type of setting or context,
and the readiness of the student to take the training again, and
they are given assistant status. We have certificates that look like
diplomas that we give to the students as a way of giving formal
recognition. We have developed five major categories of
assignments: group activities, outreach/alert, one-on-one,
elementary focus, and external programs.

Group activities include team sports, clubs or other formal groups

which exist in the school and in which the student is already a
participant. The assignment is to look for ways to use the skills in
these groups (a fellow team member is looking discouraged after
having struck out for the fourth time; a member loses a chess
match; or just normal conversations about concerns of youth).
Students may also get involved in informal or "rap" groups, or
participate in special groups structured to deal with certain
problems such as divorce, loss, drugs, pregnancy, and other areas
of concern.

The outreach/alert assignments support the student in tuning into

their existing network, or paying attention to clues which may
indicate another student is having difficulty (a student slams a
locker, a student is crying in the washroom, a student sits alone
and dejected on the playing field, etc.). These informal and
spontaneous contacts are the core of peer assistance. The peer

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 22

assistants usually experience immediate acceptance from the
troubled student, once that person sees that the peer offers genuine
listening and caring. Since this helping is dependent on the
students becoming involved in the many social networks in the
school, we anticipated during our early training experiences that
the peer assistants would become an elite clique of their own. Yet
this has not happened. Though they remain friendly towards each
other, they do not socialize together, and retain themselves in their
primary social networks. In a sense, this reaffirms the need for and
success of a broad selection process.

One-on-one assignments are usually based on a referral process,

where potential "clients" may be referred to the trainer (coordinator)
by parents, counsellors, or teachers. The coordinator reviews the
referral with the adult to determine its appropriateness and
specificity. An assigned peer assistant then talks to the referring
adult, and the adult introduces the student to the peer assistant.
We encourage the peer assistant to have their first meeting with the
student over lunch because food is friendly, there is a specific time
limit, and if it doesn't work out, they can always eat. Once the
student and the peer assistant begin meeting, progress is reviewed,
and modifications are made if the peer assistant is in over their
head.

Sometimes these referrals are just attempts to help students get to

know older students and feel less lost or alone or enhance their self-
esteem ("wow, a twelfth grader is spending time with me!"). Other

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 23

referrals can be for specific problems, including academic
difficulties, and a peer assistant may engage in tutoring. We have
found our tutors to be keenly aware of the feelings a low achieving
student expresses about being able to do certain academic work,
and the peer assistant/tutor often can give encouragement,
support, and teaching in a more effective way than a tutor who
doesn't pay attention to the feelings of inadequacy of the tutee.

Some peer assistants want to work with elementary age children, so

arrangements are made with neighbouring schools to use these
students to lead groups, talk with individuals, help with
orientations, or work on the playground. Other students may
become associated with another external program such as a
recreation centre or peer assistant training in another school or
community context. We have plans to use many of the trained peer
assistants as summer street workers, aiding the groups of kids who
gather at various locations on a regular basis throughout the city
during the lengthy summer vacations.

Regardless of assignment, formal or informal, on or off-campus, the

students meet weekly in a group to discuss their progress with their
supervisor. While the names of "clients" are not discussed, the
kinds of concerns brought up or discussed are, with an emphasis
on the peer assistants' perception of how they handled the
situations and the skills they used. Sometimes it is clear that
certain skills may need refreshing, so a workshop is scheduled;
other times it is clear that there is a commonality to the problems

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 24

"clients" are bringing up, and that a possible system-oriented
intervention can be developed and presented to change makers.
These weekly meetings enable the peer assistants to experience
support and autonomy while at the same time they see that they
are not alone in trying to help other students work towards effective
solutions to frustrating problems.

In summary, we support efforts of counsellors to discover additional

ways to involve students as resources in the counselling process. As
long as students are forced to play passive roles, areas like career
guidance will suffer. The counsellor as expert may encourage
student passivity. Even advances in computer technology may only
give students the illusion of control. We also support a systems-
oriented approach that works to understand and accept negative or
problematic elements of culture as challenges to be used rather
than eliminated. Thirdly, we support a strong focus on
developmental psychology in order to recognize superficial
expressions of concern, and rather than discard them, use these
concerns as avenues for deeper exploration. Adolescents are facile
at "smokescreens" to cover up fears and anxieties. Their search for
meaning during the early years may look like conflicts over lipstick
and tight clothing, but it is symbolic of concern for self. Their
concerns about dating in middle adolescence may look like sexual
activity, but it is a search for interpersonal competence. Finally, in
later adolescence, conflicts with adults over values and ideas are
strong attempts to find meaning in their lives.

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 25

We conclude with an exercise we often use for helping adults
identify their own peer-related decision-making in order to test out
the power of friendship relations throughout the life cycle.

1. How many of you have been thinking about

your own career during the last month?
That is, how many have had thoughts or
concerns about your career choice or
progress or are thinking about changing
jobs, retiring, advancing, etc.?
2. Formulate these thoughts, feelings into a
statement such as, "During the last month,
I've been seriously considering ...". (Write it
down, briefly.)
3. Now think about how the person next to you
might be able to help you with this
consideration. What would be, in your view,
the most important thing they could do to
help you with what you've been thinking
about?

The Theory & Practice of Peer Mentoring 26

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